Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of exercise equipment, and more particularly to the field of exercise machines for fitness and health.
Discussion of the State of the Art
Users often interact with fitness devices such as treadmills or elliptical trainers while using a smart device such as their smartphone or tablet, generally for consuming media. Generally, the interactions with the fitness device and smart device are separate, with media playback occurring independently of the user's operation of an exercise machine. For example, while running on a treadmill a user may choose to view a static screen displaying a television show. The elements in a television show are static, in that the elements do not change behavior based on the user's interactions with the television show, but instead perform predetermined actions. An example of a dynamic screen is that of a video game. The user interacts with a remote and influences the activity of the elements in the video game. At most, the user may interact with the screen performing an activity independent of actions related to interacting with the fitness device.
Furthermore, with the rapidly-expanding virtual reality industry, new interaction methods are being explored including a variety of controllers for gaming, wands, and motion-based input devices including gloves and camera-based hand tracking. However, these devices all focus on interacting with a user's hands and head movements, and ignore other parts of the body that could be used to improve interaction and immersion particularly while a user is within a known defined environment such as an exercise machine, while also expanding the possibilities for data collection.
What is needed, is an exercise machine that is designed to connect to a variety of user smart devices for interaction, that receives direction from a connected smart device and provides interaction input to a connected smart device, and that provides for the use of the human body as an input method through position and movement tracking.